I am a self-identified phobophile. I love my fears. Fear is a powerful teacher, because fear marks resistance, and resistance is a good place to discover breakthroughs. “Here be dragons!” the signpost reads. But here also be treasures, if you have the patience, trust, and willingness to look.

Fear is a billboard, a mark on the map. Fear is as clear a signal that you’re going the right way as pain is a signal that you’re going the wrong way. As usual, let me employ some metaphor to clarify what I mean:

When you burn your hand on a stove, your immediate reaction (mediated mechanisms in the spinal column itself, not the brain) is to jerk your hand away from the hot stove. Contrarily, when you’re afraid of burning your hand on the stove, your (brain-mediated) reaction will probably make it very difficult to get your fingers to touch the surface you know to be hot. In this sense, the pain response is like suddenly throwing your car in reverse, while fear is like hitting the brakes hard. Technically speaking, both of these cause the car to undergo negative acceleration (acceleration in the opposite direction of current movement), even though the results are quite different. The distinction is in some sense one of degree, and result. Pain leads to movement away from the source of pain, fear leads to reduced movement toward the object of fear.

Pain is a signal from your body that something is wrong, fear is a signal from your body that something might go wrong, based on previous experience of pain from something going wrong. And that, ultimately, is what makes fear such a profound teacher; fear is fundamentally not a feeling that happens in the Now. Fear is based on either a perceived future threat or a recalled prior threat.

When I’m feeling afraid, rather than taking a tip from Rogers and Hammerstein and whistling a happy tune, here are the steps that I go through:

1. Clarify precisely what I’m afraid of. Being stung by that hornet buzzing around me? Looking foolish flirting with an attractive stranger?
2. Identify what I’m avoiding experiencing by going into fear; ie, I’m avoiding experiencing pain with the fear of the hornet sting. I’m avoiding rejection with the fear of looking foolish to the hot stranger.
3. Identify the potential benefits of avoiding the experience the fear is tied up in. The benefit of not being stung is not being in pain. The benefit of not being rejected is not being in pain.
4. Identify the potential benefits of having the experience the fear is tied up in. The benefit of being stung by a hornet escapes me just now. The benefits of approaching the stranger is learning to handle rejection without taking it personally, possibly getting the stranger’s number, making a friend, making a networking contact, etc etc.
5. Optionally spend a moment identifying where the fear came from. Knowing the source of a problem, the painful previous experience that led to fear of similar experiences in the future, can sometimes be helpful in getting the rational mind to step in and override the fear. Sometimes. As often as not, however, I find that I get bogged down in finding the details and understanding why I’m afraid instead of simply taking action. The fear of being stung by a hornet probably comes from being told that it hurts at least as badly as a bee sting, and I know I don’t really enjoy those. The fear of being rejected could come from any number of previous experiences, social programming about how bad rejection is, how mommy wouldn’t let me have ice cream when I was 7 and really wanted it… I think it’s ultimately not that interesting an endeavor, despite traditional psychotherapy’s position.
6. Make a decision about how to handle the fear. I decide to avoid the hornet, moving calmly away from it so as not to excite it. I decide that I’m powerful enough to handle rejection if it comes, and attractive enough to merit a phone number if that comes, and remind myself that whatever reaction I get, it’s not about me (see The Four Agreements for more on that!).
7. Take action! This is the most important step. Intellectualizing is useful only for making sure I’m doing what’s really in my best interest. Running screaming from the hornet reinforces an intense and phobic reaction, so I walk calmly. Telling myself I’m strong enough to handle rejection but not asking for the stranger’s phone number is sending mixed messages to myself, and actions speak louder than words (or thoughts) to the subconscious.
8. Acknowledge myself. I always give myself a little mental high-five when I take considered action in response to fear, instead of just reactively avoiding it. Even if the considered action I take is not to push into the fear, and I don’t talk to the attractive stranger, I make sure to acknowledge myself for at least weighing the pros and cons and making a decision. This reinforces a feeling of having personal power, making it easier to tackle future fears as they arise!

So try it. If you’re afraid of embarrassing yourself by dancing in public, eating too big a steak in front of your boyfriend, or pickles, then go through, step-by-step, what you’re telling your subconscious with your actions, and make a decision. You can’t choose wrong, but consider why you’re choosing fear very carefully, when you do!

Recommended reading:

• The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz

A lot of contemporary communication skills workshops and programs focus on finding where your boundaries are and how to defend them. While the first of these goals seems like a very useful one to me, it strikes me that training people how to protect their boundaries is an unfortunately misguided way of approaching them.

First, let me clarify what I mean by “boundaries” with some situational examples.

• You are at a party and an inebriated guest makes an uncomfortably vulgar pass at you.
• You are out to dinner and one of your dining companions makes a racist, sexist, homophobic (name your bigotry) remark.
• A pushy salesperson won’t take no for an answer, persistently trying to sell you a product or service you’re clear you don’t want.
• A close friend or family member drops by unexpectedly, comes in without waiting for an invitation, and stays for hours without taking the many hints you drop (”Well, I have to get in the shower now,” you say. “Oh, that’s all right, I’ll just play Wii Sports!” they reply).

The common theme in the above examples is that Something You Don’t Want to be happening to you is happening to you. Many contemporary communication experts recommend learning how to be clear and assertive about your boundary violations without being aggressive (see Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, NVC, for instance). Others recommend disregarding social conventions of politeness as being ultimately dishonest, and simply speaking your unfiltered honest truth, such as “get out of my house, you’re annoying me, Mom.” (see Brad Blanton’s Radical Honesty method).

I’ve had some experience with both of these techniques, and for me they missed the point of discovering boundaries. Boundaries are our ideas of What We Don’t Want in our life. They can be things like “I will not tolerate racism or sexism in my home in any form,” or “I must have 3 days advance notice before my spouse’s mother can stay the night with us.” I’m sure you can come up with some personal boundaries you’ve had violated recently with just a few moments of thought.

Notice that the way we find these boundaries is generally to have them violated. Most people don’t spend much time sitting around thinking about what they will not tolerate that hasn’t happened, coming up with lists of What They Don’t Want. I’d wager that people who do this tend to lead less happy and productive lives, in fact. Instead, it is when we are suddenly confronted by our discomfort that our boundaries present themselves for our scrutiny. For example, one of your friends laughs at you for believing in Fairies, and you suddenly realize that you simply can not abide by being laughed at.

Radical Honesty’s approach would have you say “you’re a jerk for laughing at me.” You’re speaking your unfiltered truth to their trespassing upon your interior space, without trying to frame it nicely or filter it for acceptability. “This is my experience, in my terms: you’re a jerk.”

NVC would approach the matter differently, asking for synthesis on your part of the other person’s perspective before speaking. “I’m feeling discomfort because of my belief that friends shouldn’t laugh at each other. Without making you wrong, I’d really appreciate it if you would honor that belief that I hold by not laughing at me.”

My critique of Radical Honesty is that your message is highly unlikely to be received well unless every person you’re communicating with has agreed to the same principles of complete lack of filtration. It is a wonderful way of alleviating everyone of the burden of having to hedge every statement with “this is just my opinion/feeling/experience, but…” On the other hand, unless you have an agreement that that’s how communication works, people are generally extremely put off and annoyed by you for not bothering to show them the courtesy of expressing yourself in a way they can hear.

In the example I gave above, where “without making them wrong” you ask that they honor their belief that friends shouldn’t laugh at each other by not laughing at you is, I think, a beautifully formulated communication of a fundamentally psychologically weak stance. It’s like repeating to yourself “I am not strong enough to be laughed at without taking it personally and feeling deeply wounded.” Why would you wish to adopt that mantra? Please understand; I don’t believe that NVC is the problem here. The problem isn’t in how the idea is being structured and presented (which I feel NVC does a beautiful job of providing a framework for), it’s the idea itself!

So what do you do with boundaries? If your friend is laughing at you, do you say something or not? Of course your answer will depend on context (who is this friend? How close are you? How intensely uncomfortable are you?). What’s clear to me, however, is that your discomfort is no one else’s responsibility to handle but your own. And handling your discomfort by making sure that nothing happens to you that makes you uncomfortable, such as “no one must ever laugh at me,” is fundamentally impossible. If you’re clear that someone laughing at you is What You Don’t Want, congratulations, you’ve successfully identified a boundary. Now what?

My recommendation is to take the opportunity to explore your discomfort, and the reasons for it. Instead of defending your boundary and your right to it, explore why it’s there and what you can learn about yourself from the fact that you have it. This will desensitize you to the discomfort that other people’s social gaffs may cause, which is probably a worthy goal. If being laughed at rankles you, I think you primarily have the following options:

• live your life periodically uncomfortable at being laughed at
• live your life constantly expressing the unacceptability of being laughed at
• learn what it is in you that finds it so infuriating and painful and learn to release the feelings of discomfort. They only represent your internal representation of other people’s motivations, and what a strange thing to be living your life avoiding that is!

Your happiness and comfort are too important to allow other people’s opinions, words, and actions to be able to shake you out of a state of contentment and peace, and telling them not to have them, express them, or be near you because of them simply isn’t functional. Striving instead to be unshaken by What You Don’t Want will help you maintain your equanimity in all circumstances, and allow you to communicate the thoughts and ideas that are really important to you in a way that they can hear and understand and respect. Instead of asking for a behavioral change from others, create one in yourself that makes you stronger.
Ultimately, you are the audience and the star of the movie of your life. Think about what message you’re sending your non-conscious mind (the audience) when you act. If you want the audience to walk away with the idea that the main character is incapable of handling adversity, then the appropriate action is to constantly tell people that you have boundaries, where they are, and defend them like they’re incredibly important. If, however, you want your non-conscious to behave like the star of the show is powerful, capable of handling any situation calmly and with poise, you have to take responsibility for acting capable and strong in every circumstance, and one appropriate way of doing that is by looking only to what you really know and can understand, yourself, to pave the way.

Don’t defend your boundaries; expand them.

Recommended Reading

• Radical Honesty, by Brad Blanton
• Nonviolent Communication, by Marshall Rosenberg

There are very few things that I love more than a clean house. I’ve even been (jokingly… I hope) accused of being obsessive about it. Having a clean house just makes me feel good, more energized, healthier, and happier.

Have you ever noticed that one of your favorite ways to procrastinate is to clean your desk or apartment? Have you noticed that you work more productively and think more clearly when you’re in a clean environment? I certainly have. I don’t have any hard scientific proof, nor do I know if science has even looked into this phenomenon, but my hypothesis is that our outer space is a reflection of our inner space. When our work and living spaces are orderly, so are our minds. We are less distracted and we can work and live better, with increased clarity.

When I clean, it’s an active meditation. Not only am I cleaning my surroundings, I am cleaning and clearing my mind. It’s an utterly empowering, rejuvenating, and fun process. I actually get excited about cleaning!

One of my favorite television shows is How Clean is Your House? In this program, the Cleaning Queens of Britain, Kim Woodburn and Aggie MacKenzie, scrub and declutter some of the filthiest abodes you could ever imagine. I’m not even kidding. Piles and piles of junk in every corner, the floors are nowhere to be seen, bugs are breeding in the kitchen, and the occupants are so entrapped in their situation that they don’t even know how to begin reversing it. A good number of these people suffer from asthma and allergies (with all the mold and bacteria in these houses, it is not at all surprising). Nearly each of these houses harbors large colonies of klebsiella, e. coli, and staphyllococcus. Gross!

Once the house is cleaned, Kim and Aggie give the occupants two weeks to acclimate to their new surroundings and lifestyles. It warms me to see how these peoples’ lives have changed for the better: more romance, families getting along better, reduced or alleviated symptoms of allergies and asthma, greater senses of pride, confidence, self love, and happiness. All this from a clean house!

I know that the examples in How Clean is Your House are extreme cases and that most of us don’t have these problems. However, we can all benefit from living and working in a clean atmosphere.

Here are some of my tips for cleaning your house and keeping it that way:

1. Create and stick with a cleaning schedule: Every Friday I go through my house and clean every room. I vacuum, sweep, do laundry, dust, and put displaced things where they belong. I have a systematic approach where I move from the patio, to the living room, dining room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and then the bedroom. Each room getting cleaned top to bottom. Then, I sweep and vacuum, as I don’t want to track things from room to room or knock crumbs and dust onto a clean floor while dusting or cleaning kitchen and bathroom counter tops. Finally, I burn some incense, candles, and essential oils to add a nice little cherry to the top of my calm and clean atmosphere sundae. I find this systematic approach optimal for me, but others may want to try something different. The important thing is to have a regular schedule and stick to it.

It’s not even necessary to clean the entire house at once. Perhaps you only have time to clean one room a day. If so, assign yourself (or your kids or roommates) certain days to clean each room. Have a plan and stick to it.

2.Get rid of clutter: Clutter is a clean house’s nemesis. If you don’t use something, get rid of it. Put it on craigslist.org, give it to a friend, or give it to charity. Above all, don’t keep it. Get it out of the house and forget about it. (This is a topic deserves an article itself. I’ll hit on this next time!).

3.Enjoy the process: Many people despise cleaning and find it boring. My suggestion is to find joy in it by focusing on how good it feels to be in a clean room. Put your attention on how great your house looks when it’s tidy. Concentrating your energy on the end result will propel you to spotless bliss.

4.Use cleaning items that you love: Find cleaning products that you enjoy smelling and using. Don’t buy a cleaning product if you can’t stand its smell or it doesn’t work well. You won’t want the smell of your house to be an assault on your nose, nor do you want to use twice the elbow grease because of a crappy product. You’ll be less likely to use it and less likely to clean. There are countless environmentally friendly products available now that leave your house smelling fresh without killing your olfactory senses. Two of my favorites brands are Method and Seventh Generation.

5.Keep up with the little things: It doesn’t take long to go from immaculate to garbage heap. Throughout the week, keep up with little things like dishes, vacuuming, and putting things away as you use them. It will only take 5-10 minutes a day and will streamline your cleaning routine, making your weekly clean up faster and easier to maintain.

Once you get into a habit of keeping a clean house, you’ll find that it’s almost effortless, even enjoyable. Notice how much more comfortable, clearer, happier, and confident it makes you. Create your own routines and practices, play with the process, and bask in the joy of chilling out in a sparkling, clear abode. Happy cleaning!

The Goals in Chiropractic

I can’t make claims about the goal of Chiropractic universally, because different Chiropractors have different objective criteria that they’re trying to meet. On the other hand, I can make claims about what some of the major themes that you’ll see among philosophically-grounded Chiropractors’ goals. Many talk about liberating the nervous system from bony and soft-tissue restrictions so that the body can heal itself. One of the big-picture goals that I’ve heard a number of Chiropractors, teachers, and students talk about is the increase of the conscious expression of Life.

For the sake of simplicity and clarity, let us take these two goals and apply an understanding of the goals of the Alexander Technique and a highly simplified understanding of the goals of a yoga practice to them, and note the similarities.

Alexander Technique and Yoga, as their goals relate to Chiropractic

Alexander Technique, briefly, seeks to train the student to consciously inhibit habitual movement (and cognitive) patterns in order to allow greater conscious use of the Self. Its underpinnings are epiphenomenological (meaning based on the internal states and processes of the students’ body and mind) and underscores the individual’s ability to consciously reconstruct their habits (clenching the jaw before rising from a chair, for instance), thus creating intelligent habits of movement (keeping the muscles of the face relaxed while standing up) to replace the old, dysfunctional ones.

Yoga is a slightly trickier to quickly and easily define. In the West, yoga is generally understood to be a physical practice of exercise that emphasizes breathing and stretching. This is not an entirely inaccurate characterization, but it misses the philosophical underpinnings of the practice and the much larger spiritual framework from which it sprang. To grossly simplify, yoga is any practice (physical, devotional, what have you) that leads the yogi through the layers of the Self toward an inner understanding that liberates the spirit from the weight of the body and the machinations of the mind.

Chiropractic removes interference from the nervous system that can produce all manner of disease symptoms, anxiety, tension, and pain. In so doing, a greater feeling of stillness and peace are more often experienced. We are able to think more clearly when we’re not distracted by extraneous sensation.

All three practices have at their core, in some sense, an aim to create a greater feeling of stillness in the body in order to cultivate a greater feeling of stillness in the mind, so that the Self that is the observer, the formless and featureless Atman (in Yogic terms), or Innate Intelligence (in Chiropractic) can experience only itself, without the distraction of the material world’s distractions. This stillness has inherent within it a greater capacity for movement in any direction (such as yoga is particularly well-known for giving its practitioners).

From this perspective, Chiropractic can serve to function, in many ways, like assisted yoga. The goals are very similar, only the methods differ. By receiving regular, skilled Chiropractic care, a yogi or meditator or student of the Alexander Technique can expect to deepen and accelerate their practice, allowing them to make more strides in less time and with less effort.

For those not practicing yoga, Alexander, meditation, or any other technique that serves to still the Body/Mind complex, Chiropractic can be a wonderful way to achieve many of the results that these techniques achieve with less time investment.

Recommended Resources:

• How to Practice, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (XIV)
• Body Learning, by Michael Gelb

There is an unfortunate misunderstanding in our culture about the nature of intuition. Let me first address what intuition isn’t.

• Intuition is not having visions

Please don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not saying that you can’t have intuitive visions, or visionary intuition, but that intuition is not, fundamentally, either of those things.

• Intuition is not precognitions of doom

It’s quite possible to have intuitive “hits” about upcoming disasters, misfortunes, and otherwise doomful things, but this is the exception, and not the rule.

• Intuition is not an emotional sense

Intuition, real intuition, is not a sudden experience of fear when thinking about your mother dying. It’s not looking at someone you care about and suddenly being grief-stricken knowing that they have an incurable illness that they don’t know they have yet but you miraculously do.

• Intuition is rarely direct

My experience of my intuition is that it rarely is a bell ringing followed by the voice of God telling me something that’s true in no uncertain terms. “Your sister is going to have a baby!” says God, and “Oh!” says I - is not how it tends to work.

Intuition is, in fact, a very dry experience. It’s not emotionally loaded; emotional weight is a good sign that you’re having an imaginative experience and not an intuitive one. Let me reiterate: if you look at a friend and suddenly experience fear that they’re going to die in a plane crash tonight, you can be relatively confident that you’re not getting an intuitive hit on their death, just subjecting yourself to an emotional flight of fancy.

If, on the other hand, you look at a stranger and have a sudden thought about them having a baby soon, and you just don’t care in the slightest and can’t even figure out why you’d have that thought, that may well be an intuitive data point. But referring to my last bullet point above about the indirectness of intuition, I want to add that that thought about the stranger having a baby does not necessarily mean that that stranger is going to have a baby in a literal sense. It might. It might also mean that that stranger is about to birth a new creative endeavor, is starting a new business venture, is close to reclaiming his or her childlike wonder of the world… who knows!

Only you can or do. No one else can interpret your intuitive symbolism for you, any more than someone else can really accurately interpret your dreams; or if they can, it’s only because they have practice interpreting other people’s symbolic sets. The symbolic meanings of dreams, like intuitive data points, are based entirely on the experiencer’s internal metaphorical and symbolic languages. This means you need to practice associating intuitive symbolism and understanding with its physical-world correlate if you want to improve your intuitive abilities.

This brings me to the major point. We’re all intuitive. We’re born screamingly intuitive, with massive amounts of information flooding our tiny post-natal brains constantly until we develop functional filters based on the types of information our parents and others around us are interacting with. We have gut instincts and hunches that tell us how to survive, first, and then lead us, if we let them, into doing what we were born to do.

If your intuition isn’t a regular and steady presence in your life, if you don’t feel like you know what your intuition feels like when it lands, how to interpret it, or how to get intuitive guidance without feeling like a flaky new ager who has to carry crystals around everywhere in order to figure out what to order for lunch, or even if your intuition does guide and lead you, but you want to develop it and take it to the next level, may I very strongly recommend the following:

• Anatomy of the Spirit, by Caroline Myss
• Energy Anatomy, by Carline Myss